


Wednesday lunchtimes

by SecondStarOnTheLeft



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-18
Updated: 2013-03-18
Packaged: 2017-12-05 20:33:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/727643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft/pseuds/SecondStarOnTheLeft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tyrion isn’t due back to school until the fourth day of term - he hasn’t a first year class to look after, thank God, and everyone agreed that it wouldn’t be a good idea to let him be involved in the prefect training this year, not after last year, and he’s been teaching in St Aemon’s since he left college - so he’s one of the last to hear about the new teacher that has everyone all up in a tizzy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wednesday lunchtimes

**Author's Note:**

> Just go with it.  
> Ages are screwy, just roll with it.  
> I can explain the Irish school system if need be but it shouldn't be necessary?  
> Enjoy.
> 
> God writing fluff is stressful.

Tyrion isn’t due back to school until the fourth day of term - he hasn’t a first year class to look after, thank God, and everyone agreed that it wouldn’t be a good idea to let him be involved in the prefect training this year, not after  _last_ year, and he’s been teaching in St Aemon’s since he left college - so he’s one of the last to hear about the new teacher that has everyone all up in a tizzy.

Because apparently, she’s both incredibly good looking and the daughter of one of the head Department inspectors. Which of course means everyone in the staff room’s a bit wary of her, and the boys are already drooling over her.

“She’s teaching English, same as you, and Music with it, I think,” Renly says, holding the door open and letting Tyrion step through before shutting it smartly to prevent a couple of brave second years tried to see into the staff room from the other side of the hall. “Seems nice enough. Bit shy, maybe, but she’s alright.”

She does seem alright - she’s got an awful lot of bright red hair tied back in a long ponytail and large-lens glasses balanced low on a straight, freckled nose, and she smiles and shakes Tyrion’s hand and doesn’t make an issue of his height. She’s wearing shoes so high Tyrion’s vertigo acts up just looking at them, and the bag beside her chair is overflowing not only with text books, but also just with… Books.

There’s a violin case, too, and a small box file that has sheet music poking out at the sides, and Sansa Stark blushes when Tyrion asks her about it.

“I offered to train the female end of the choir,” she says. “I sing a lot myself, and both of the other Music teachers are men, so…”

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t seem to make friends easily, and coming from Tyrion - who manages to offend everyone within moments of meeting them, just because most of them seem either discomfited or repulsed by his stature - that’s saying something.

Renly shrugs it off when Tyrion raises the subject over lunch one day, but Renly has Honours Leaving Certs demanding the Maths tests they took during their morning class back during their afternoon class, so he’s under pressure and Tyrion doesn’t put much stock in Renly’s opinion.

He finds her reading  _Romeo and Juliet_ before class that afternoon - he’s next door with the sixth years, he’ll be handing back their first attempts at a question on Patrick Kavanagh this time, and Christ, some of them are comical they misunderstood the loneliness and disconnect Kavanagh felt in Iniskeen as seen in  _Iniskeen Road: July Evening,_ and he can’t bloody wait to get them onto  _Epic_ and  _The Great Hunger_ and  _Shancoduff_ \- and knocks on the door before entering.

“A little light reading?” he asks, heaving himself up into a chair and grinning. “I was under the impression that this third year class spent the past two years reading  _The Merchant of Venice,_ Miss Stark.”

She smiles shyly, holding her page but closing the book over.

“They are,” she admits, “but I like this one, too.”

“A great romance?”

To his surprise, she snorts derisively.

“Hardly,” she says, a hint of mocking, teasing, in her voice. “But there’s a sort of sweetness in tragedy, don’t you think?”

 

* * *

 

He starts eating his lunch in room twenty-two on Wednesdays, on the days when Sansa Stark is teaching her third years about racism in the Tudor era in that room directly after lunch and he’s next door in room twenty-three with his sixth years, discussing the difference in Kavanagh during his early years and his Canal Bank poems.

It’s nice - she’s quite charming, once you get past how shy she is, and Renly trains the senior rugby team on Wednesdays so Tyrion’s always been at a bit of a loss anyways, so it’s no skin off his nose to give the lonliest teacher in the school some company. He doesn’t really understand why she’s so lonely - if the rest of them think that keeping away from her will prevent her father from bearing them ill will, they’re idiots - but he’s always been a bit lonely too, so maybe it’s best that they’re lonely together.

“You can’t honestly tell me you prefer Frost to Heaney,” he says around a mouthful of salad one rainy Wednesday - there are first years skidding up and down the slippery floor in the hall outside, and he should probably go out and stop them, but Sansa is laughing and that seems much more important than stopping stupid thirteen year olds from falling over. “That's practically treason! Heaney is the finest poetic mind this country has ever produced!”

“Technically, this country didn't produce him considering he wasn't born in the Republic. What about Yeats?”

“Bah,” Tyrion huffs. “ _Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths_ indeed. He would have been better off finding a single woman to write poetry for, and by a single woman I do  _not_ mean Maud Gonne’s daughter.”

“Fine, if not Yeats, then Boland.”

“I admire Boland,” he says. “I enjoy teaching her - but there is a lot in her poetry that I can’t relate to by dint of being a man, Sansa.”

“I love her work,” Sansa says, turning the page of her book -  _The Plough and the Stars_ today, she’s teaching it to her second years, and Tyrion admires her for tackling it with fourteen year olds given the intensity of that finale, especially given how their parents will react. He remembers well enough how Dany’s fifth years’ parents reacted to  _An Triail,_ and they’re sixteen or seventeen for the most part. “And you’re reading her wrong if you think you have to be a woman to relate to her.”

“I’m  _reading_ her wrong? I’ve been teaching Boland since before you’d moved past  _On the Ning Nang Nong-“_

* * *

 

He hears her sing for the first time coming up to Christmas, while she’s helping Little Jon and Mance get the choir ready for the Christmas concert. They actually sound good this year, for the first time in  _years,_ because the girls finally have a choir mistress.

They’re doing  _Carol of the Bells,_ three part, SAT. Tyrion has vague memories of Cersei and Jaime singing in choirs when they were at school - not a mixed school, of course, only the convent and the diocesan school for Lannisters - and  _Carol of the Bells_ has always a favourite of his mother’s, so he lingers in the door and listens.

Then Sansa holds up a hand for quiet (and gets it, Jesus, she must be doing something right because the choir crowd are a notorious shower of shits), and she sings the  _correct_ soprano line.

Tyrion understands why she prefers lyrical poetry, he thinks. 

 

* * *

 

He bumps into Sansa when he’s out with Jaime for a drink and a catch-up three weeks before Christmas. She’s with some lad who looks so like her that he has to be her brother, and another who fusses about her like another big brother, and the girl leaning against her elbow (not even her shoulder) looks as much like Big Brother Number 2 as Sansa looks like Big Brother Number 1, so she must be a sister.

Sansa, to his surprise, smiles and waves when she notices him, and teeters across the pub in those absurd shoes (she wears towering stilettoes every day, five and six inches added to her five-foot-ten height, and she towers over him and is beautiful,  _Christ on a bike, I must be locked)._ Jaime snickers into his pint before she reaches them and asks who the pretty ginger is, and Tyrion kicks him in the knee and tells him to behave.

“What a lovely surprise,” she says, and there’s laughter in her voice that Tyrion begrudges Jaime, and when she kisses him on the cheek her hair falls loose and heavy around them and smells of something light and floral. “I didn’t expect to see you here - is this your brother?”

Jaime makes a big show of introducing himself as  _Detective_ Lannister - yeah, right, less said about Jaime’s career the better, especially after that mess with the smugglers up in Dundalk - and then Sansa's brothers and sister come over, introduce themselves as Robb and Jon (Tyrion can place them now, remembers them playing for the county team before the older one went off to England to work and the one who looks like Sansa nearly broke his neck in a car crash and was told no more contact sports) and Arya, who swings herself up onto the bench beside Jaime and chats about rugby, of all things, and then about cars (Sansa whispers that Arya's going out with a mechanic and became an expert on engines because she can't stand not being at least as good at everything as everyone else). 

It's nice - weirdly so, because everything about this is massively fucked up considering Jaime is fifteen kinds of a dickhead and Tyrion gets the feeling that under normal circumstances Sansa's brothers and sister would hate him and Jaime, but fuck it, Tyrion honestly enjoys Sansa's company and by some miracle she seems to enjoy his, and that's probably why he ends up wandering down to the taxi rank with her at four o'clock after buying her chips.

"You put too much vinegar on your chips," she tells him while they're sitting on the low wall in front of the old bank, waiting on a taxi, and then she kisses him.

 

* * *

 

He gets her home safely, and even goes to the door with her because he's fairly sure she's too drunk to get her key in the lock, but he gets back into the taxi and goes to his own house because he's full sure that doing anything else would be taking advantage of Sansa, and he doesn't want to do that.

She calls at some ungodly hour (Christ, she can't have gotten more than three hours sleep) and asks if she did anything embarrassing last night, because her memory is a bit hazy (he's amazed she's functional, given the rate at which she went through those Appletinis).

He says no. 

 

* * *

 

Tyrion brings Mam to the Christmas concert because she loves those things, and it's nice to get to spend time with her away from Father.

"Jaime told me he met a friend of yours," Mam whispers as they settle into a pew about halfway up the main aisle of the church. "Pretty girl with red hair from work."

Sansa waves when she sees him, waves and smiles and then turns back to the choir, and Tyrion tells Mam that yes, that is his friend, and yes, she is pretty, and no, he would not like to continue this conversation because he's nearly thirty, thanks, and really doesn't need his mother giving him advice on women.

He gives two TYs detention for the following week because of the things he hears them saying about Sansa and Little Jon, and when they whine that they're not in school, he tells thaem that so long as they're wearing the uniform he can still punish them because they're representing the school, and feels quietly smug about it all through dinner with Mam.

 

* * *

 

The last week of term before Christmas is the usual crap, because while the first, second and fifth years have their Christmas tests, the third and sixth years are settling into the horrifying realisation that they're mocks are only a couple of months away, and the TYs are being their usual obnoxious selves and keep making noise.

Renly's cracking up, because someone thought it'd be a good idea to put his double Maths with the sixth years on Friday - the last bloody day of term - just across the hall from the TYs, and Tyrion's not massively impressed with whoever thought it'd be a good idea to put him and his third years right up on the top floor of the school, meaning lots of stairs between him and his class.

He kisses Sansa's hand in thanks when she swaps with him - she has the TYs for Music in room twelve, just down from the staff room, and she makes sure to catch them and tell them to run up to room thirty-one, and he manages to nab enough of his third years for word to get out about the room change.

It's a quiet class, because even though they're all keyed up about getting off for Christmas, especially considering they've a half day, they know better than to push their luck with Tyrion when he's bene good enough to let them off homework for the past week in favour of having discussion classes (which have been a lot better organised than the discussion classes he's tried with his sixth years).

He wishes them all a happy Christmas and sends them on their way when the bell rings, and he packs up his things and is waiting for the corridors to clear before heading for the staff room when Renly knocks on the door and grins.

"Ready for tonight?"

 

* * *

 

"Tonight" is, of course, the staff Christmas party in the big hotel in town. Renly defiantly brings his boyfriend, Loras, and ignores the way some of the other teachers give them dirty looks all through the meal. Tyrion goes stag, as always, and is surprised when Sansa arrives just barely on time with Loras' sister, Margaery, in tow.

"I heard that she's a lesbian," Petyr slurs at some point after desert, while Sansa is dancing with Renly and the Tyrells. Nobody likes Petyr - he's a bit creepy - but his Economics and Accounting classes have the highest rates of A1s of any subject in the school, so he's tolerated. "That Margaery - she teaches Art and French in the convent."

"And your point is?" Tyrion asks, wondering how he can get away from Petyr before he passes out from the smell of Guiness and softmints on the other man's breath. 

"Is she  _with_ Sansa?" Petyr persists, and Tyrion can't help but laugh - Petyr must be absolutely shitfaced to be talking like this to  _him_ of all people.

 

* * *

 

He ends up sitting with Sansa and Loras in a corner of the function room with an awful lot of alcohol in his system, sharing stories about their siblings.

Tyrion's are the worst, of course, partially because his and Cersei's relationship has always been tense at best and outright belligerent at worst, but mostly because the twins are seventeen years older than him and he wasn't exactly what they'd been hoping for in a little brother or sister.

Still, Loras' stories of his brothers' misadventures - one trains the horses that Loras races, the other keeps the accounts and makes certain that nobody is diddled out of winnings - are funny, probably made funnier by all that whiskey, and Sansa tips to the side when she laughs and leans against Tyrion to keep her balance, and it's  _nice,_ everything is  _nice_ and he's missed things being nice.

 

* * *

 

"You two are the worst flirts I've ever seen," Renly says, narrowly avoiding Tyrion's eye in an attempt at poking him in the nose. "Go snog her, Lannister, she wants it just as much as you do."

Tyrion does not, despite Renly's stellar advice, snog Sansa Stark that night.

 

* * *

 

Christmas at home is the usual battle - Cersei brings her three, who are also Renly's nephews and niece by his oldest brother, and Jaime brings his not-girlfriend Brienne, who Tyrion genuinely thinks isn't Jaime's girlfriend, but who's come to Christmas dinner every year since her father died.

Myrcella and Tommen are good kids - although Myrcella's a lot bitchier than Tyrion remembers her being, but he supposes he hasn't seen her since Mam's birthday in August - but Joff's his usual moody, grumpy self. He's not that awful much younger than Tyrion, but he's tall like every other bloody Lannister in history, and he's got Cersei's smile and Robert's eyes and is apparently very charming when he wants to be.

"I hear Sansa Stark is teaching with you," he says to Tyrion when by some horrible coincidence he and Joff are coming back from the loo at the same time (not the same loo, obviously, Tyrion hates the stairs in the house and uses the downstairs loo by the conservatory, and knowing Joff he was probably stupid enough to use Mam and Father's en suite).

"You know her?"

"I went out with her when we were at college."

And that explains a lot about why Sansa is so shy, because Tyrion has heard what Joff is like with girls and... Well, he's his father's son in some ways, but in others he's much, much worse.

It also makes Tyrion wonder about that kiss he tried very hard to forget.

 

* * *

 

Old Luwin sends him looking for Sansa for an emeergency staff meeting during their first week back - some of the mock papers arrived early, but they're the wrong ones or something, it's Music and Tyrion wasn't really listening - and he walks in on her teaching  _Hamlet_ to her fifth years.

"-and if his treatment of Ophelia doesn't mark him as something less than a hero, what would? His remorseless killing of Polonius- oh, Mr Lannister. Can I help you?"

"Mr Luwin is looking for you," he says. "Want me to keep an eye on this lot while you're gone?"

"That'd be great," she says gratefully, gathering up some of her things and slipping down off her high stool. "Thanks a million-"

"Go on, I'll take over," he laughs, waving her through the door before turning to the class - he has a lot of them for History, and they know better than to act up. "So - Hamlet as the villain, is it?"

"Miss Stark reckons it's lazy to just read it as a straight good versus evil, sir," offers one of them - not one of Tyrion's History class, unfortunately, so he doesn't have a name for the face, although given those clever eyes he thinks she might be one of Oberyn's girls. "She said that's a very  _basic_ reading of a play as complex as  _Hamlet,_ sir."

"Did she indeed," he agrees, amused at Sansa's tendency to push alternate readings more than most of the English Department approve of. "Come on then, give me your complex theories on Gertrude, then."

 

* * *

 

Their theories on Gertrude and Ophelia are exactly what he was expecting from a class of Sansa's, and he's relieved that they aren't what he  _feared._

* * *

 

"Do you want to go out for something to eat this weekend?"

It's so much easier to say than the three days of nervous wittering at Renly would have led Tyrion to believe, but Sansa smiles and tells him she's free on Saturday night.

On Saturday night, while he's driving them into town (he's too nervous to drink, he hasn't done the whole dating thing since Tysha, and  _everyone-_ well, no, only Renly and Jaime and Mam know how that went), she tells him that it's been a while since she's gone out with anyone.

"He was your nephew, actually," she admits. "Joff. He was... He wasn't nice."

And they don't mention their romantic histories again that night, and it's  _lovely,_ properly lovely, and they chat as easily as they do during lunchtime on Wednesdays and it's blessedly easy.

He leaves her home and she kisses him on the cheek, sits back, and then kisses him very softly on the lips.

He grins like a fucking idiot all the way home and then again from the moment he wakes up on Sunday morning, and he's in such good humour that he lets Renly talk him into going to the match even though he hasn't gone to a football match since before Jaime stopped playing.

 

* * *

 

They take it slowly, because that's just how they want to take it.

Tyrion's not sure how (he suspects Tommen via Renly), but Mam finds out after he and Sansa have gone on their fifth date. She tells him to drop in if he's passing on Saturday morning, and she has a full fry complete with fried bread waiting for him.

"She seems a nice young woman," Mam says firmly, and Tyrion adds an extra sugar to his tea in celebration of earning her approval.

 

* * *

 

"We were seen on Friday night, apparently," Sansa says lightly one Wednesday a couple of weeks after the mocks, not looking up from her Byron anthology. "I overheard some of my sixth years talking about seeing us before they realised I was in the room."

Her smile is a tiny thing, but he's become adept at reading her smiles these past few months and he really, really fucking likes this one.

"They think we make an adorable couple, apparently."

The other teachers aren't quite so enamoured with their whatever-it-is (Tyrion's hesitant to term it a romance, because he's not entirely certain Sansa sees it that way), but Sansa doesn't even seem to notice and breezes around the school in those mad shoes that make her long legs look even longer, her lovely hair swept back in ponytails and twisted up in buns and never loose around her shoulders the way it is on Fridays or Saturdays when he takes her out to dinner. 

 

* * *

 

She invites him in for a nightcap the Friday the school closes up for Easter, and he's so nervous he almost says no.

 

* * *

 

He wakes up first the next morning, and those long legs and that lovely hair are tangled up around him and he likes it more than he could say (he'd shame any of his students for not even trying to find the words to express themselves, but fuck it, he's not going to be sitting an exam). 

Sansa lifts her head, bleary-eyed still, and grins.

"You've got a filthy mouth," she tells him, and then she kisses him.

 


End file.
